The EU Commission During the Covid-19 Crisis: Attempts at Self-Empowerment, or Not?

Abstract

We argue that the European Commission, like national governments, is likely to have used the Covid-19 crisis as an opportunity to bolster its own powers. We focus on the Commission's attempts to insert into legal proposals provisions to adopt delegated or implementing acts, as this is the only possible way to gain lasting rule-making powers. We analyse all the Commission's legal proposals for an equal time span before and after the start of the Covid-19 crisis and study whether the number of proposed delegation provisions has changed after the onset of the crisis. The analysis, to our surprise, does not show any clear evidence of a self-empowerment strategy. In the conclusion, we discuss likely explanations for this non-finding.